Hunt for cancer vaccines continues despite failures
27th Nov 2005, 14:33 GMT
The history of cancer vaccines is a history of failure. For 20 years, scientists have dreamed of creating vaccines that teach the body to destroy tumors. Yet after hundreds of clinical trials, not a single vaccine has been approved to treat cancer. Yet everybody is still trying. There are at least 100 cancer-vaccine trials planned or under way throughout the country. Their goal is not to prevent cancer, but to treat it -- to stimulate the body to attack cancers of the skin, prostate, pancreas, breast and lungs, to name a few. The three ways doctors treat cancer now -- surgery, radiation, chemotherapy -- are brutal, aggressive approaches that can cause permanent harm or even death. The ideal vaccine, by contrast, would nudge the body to heal itself -- an advance that could reduce the cutting, burning and poisoning that now comprise the anti-cancer arsenal, said Dr. Steven Burakoff, director of the New York University Cancer Institute.
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